Kara Jackson
As part of our Artists To Watch list, we’ve conducted interviews with the eight artists featured in our 2021 Spring/Summer edition. Check out our Q&A with Kara Jackson below and click here to check out the full list.
Kara Jackson’s music often feels like the warm embrace of a friend. With their soothing contralto voice, endearing lyrics, and guitar licks, some of their songs make you want to slow dance at a wedding, and others are perfect for hiding under your blanket on a cold winter night. Through their masterful songwriting, Kara can adorn even the most basic sentiment in ways that feel transcendental and make you feel them tenfold with their singing. The former national youth poet laureate had a busy 2019 fulfilling the duties that come with that honor; publishing a chapbook, releasing the tender A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart EP, and starting freshman year of college all the way out in Massachusetts. So, even though the pandemic radically changed the course of their 2020, Kara embraced the forced stillness back at home in Oak Park to be intentional and focus on their debut album in between virtual classes. To say it’s a record we’re excited for would be an understatement.
You had a very busy 2019 —a lot of huge things happened for you that year—and for various reasons, 2020 was a lot quieter. How much of that was due to external factors like COVID and how much was it something that you intentionally wanted to do?
Well, I think that the pandemic definitely had an impact. Obviously, not doing shows and not having gigs, kind of makes it seem like you're not really doing as much. And I think a lot of my friends have felt similarly. This is such a weird time to be an artist. But I think that 2019 was really impactful and a lot of things were happening —my EP came out and my chapbook was released in the same span of time—that I definitely just wanted to take my time, even if it was unintentional because after that summer I started school.
I’m also working on my album now and that’s what 2020-going-into-2021 has really been about, just more so working on things and not being as loud about things. But I also released things in 2020 for Bandcamp day that I'm proud of. I just wasn't necessarily anticipating that I was going to release anything. I tell people that I'm allergic to releasing things.
I released a Christmas EP and a cover. And that has been kind of fun. I definitely was OK with 2020 being quieter, even if it was not necessarily an intentional choice, it was just kind of a natural one. I'm hoping that this year things start to pick up a little bit more and I think I'm going to be more intentional about things because they coming to fruition. I'm giving myself the time to not rush things and be really intentional about the things I'm working on. That's just been kind of my vibe this whole pandemic.
You mentioned that you are a prolific writer, but sometimes you hold back on actually releasing stuff. Have you thought about what’s stopped you in the past or is it something that just happens?
I think I'm just really intentional about releases. It’s not so much that I don't want to release things or that there's something holding me back. Some of my friends who are rappers would be like, "I have three projects planned for this year" and I have never been one of these people. I'm kind of like, “No, y'all will get what I have to offer you.” Especially with my album, there are so many songs that I've written in the last two years, but I really just like being intentional about what songs I actually want to put out. That’s the kind of person I've always been. The people I look up to and the artists I love a lot are also prolific but intentional in that way. I think about somebody like Sufjan Stevens and how many songs he's just sitting on that we will just never hear. And I think that's fine because sometimes that's just the way that it is.
Also, as a poet, even when I'm writing a lot of things, I don't necessarily think they're for everyone and I also don't necessarily think they’re on the track to be released. I don't really think that way when I'm writing. I think more in terms of “How am I going to approach this project in a really intentional way?" Even working on my album, I was like, “Okay, like now all these songs can exist.” It's kind of like Tyra Banks, "I have two pictures in my hand, one of y’all is going to have to leave." I'm a big editor. I like to think of writing and editing as two separate practices. The editing is really the work, the refining and being intentional. I am going to write a lot of songs in my life, I write a lot of things and not all of them are good, but I think that it will be worth it in the end.
Do you have a sense of how close you are to finishing the project or is it an evolving thing?
I think that it's very evolving. I definitely don't know how close. I've actually made some milestones and this month I've finished all the writing —all the songs are written. Now, it's really just an evolving process because I don't really want to put a timeline on things. There is this, like, tiny person inside of me that's like, “when is it going to be done?” But I'm trying to suppress that voice and be like “literally, shut up.” [laughs] It's going to be done with it when I feel like it's done.
You mentioned that you finished writing the album and now the rest of the process will happen. Is that normally how you tackle your music? Do you have to write it down first and then you can imagine the rest?
Yeah, particularly with the stuff I'm working on now, the writing is really important. I also play the guitar, so when my writing is done, I know what the songs are going to sound like. I will come up with melodies first and write based off what the melody is like. I'll do that, but I've never been a producer-type of person, I just have real instruments. I have to do some more imagining in terms of instrumentation. For these initial demos, I really have just been in my house —in my bedroom—with my mic and my guitar. That’s what I have, so that's how I have to approach things. I can be more intentional about instrumentation once I'm done, because I can be like, “OK, I know this is written in this way, so now I can start to imagine things beyond it.” But I definitely feel with this album I was really trying to be intentional about the lyricism and also the narratives, there’s a lot of storytelling on this album. I just had to have that down first because I knew I couldn't get in the booth and freestyle. [laughs]
You wear many creative hats as a musician, poet and a published writer. How do you navigate between these different creative spaces?
A lot of people ask me this question, particularly “when you're writing songs versus when you're writing poems.” And I think the older I get the more I'm starting to not really see those processes and practices as separate. Even though they quite literally are separate projects, I think the work is all the same. I think of everything in terms of writing and editing. I consider myself to be a writer and I consider myself to be a singer too. Maybe that’s a separate skill, but at the end of the day, I'm just writing and I love to write things and that just comes out and it’s applicable in different ways. I write things and sometimes it looks like songs and sometimes it looks like essays and sometimes it looks like poems. I'm starting to really see those spaces as being one.
That kind of comes from also rejecting the notion of art-making as being tied to suffering. I'm really trying to unlearn the idea that I have to be in the mood to write or I have to have some type of bad experience. With my songs especially, I'd be like, “well, damn, I'm sad now, it's time to pick up the guitar and write.” But now I'm approaching art as a practice and as work. Not in a capitalistic sense, but work as in, it's a muscle. Your imagination and creativity are muscles that you can work on the same way that you do yoga every day and your posture gets better and not so much as “I have to be in the mood to write” or “I have to lean into my suffering.” I'm trying to separate all those things because I think that they're kind of unhealthy. They just inspire blockages and writer's block. I've gotten to the point where even finishing the writing of my album was like work. I gave myself an amount of time to do this. And I was like, “no, every day you work on these songs because you can.” No longer limiting myself to my mood and my emotions makes me feel like more of an artist, this is a practice and this is something I work on on a regular basis.
Once Covid is controlled, we're allowed to go to venues, what would be your ideal headlining show? What would it look like? Where would it be?
I've never been the headliner, so I have to think. Oh, my gosh, I don't even know. It's so hard to think of myself as being like the one and then naming people with the smaller text. My ideal gig in general, I don't know, I've always imagined doing —and I feel like I've told them this—but I would love to do a show with Jamila [Woods] and Tasha. I love them very much. And I feel like that's a dream line-up of mine. That's why I don't think I can imagine myself as a headliner because I would just love to be the first person to perform. I would love to do that. It's kind of an easy answer, though, because those are two people I know and in conversation with. But I also would love to do something with Moses Sumney, that would be really cool. My friend Christelle. I just think that I would really be flattered to play with a lot of people. I also would love to do something with Waxahatchee, like a country show. It would be so cool to be me, Waxahatchee, and like, Lucinda Williams. I also would just, this is random and does not make sense, maybe, but I would love to do a show with Kacey Musgraves. But it’s our show together. I would love to do duets with Kacey Musgraves. I really would like that to happen in real life. I don't know how I'm going to make it happen, but I see us in matching outfits, doing songs together in tandem. I think that would be pretty spectacular and maybe really random to everyone else. But it would feel like a dream to me.